Post 74.

It seems like a good time to conclude my eco-literate pedagogy blog at eco-literate.com. Recently, I downloaded all of the posts. The blog has 55,397 words (in Word, at 12-font, Times, that’s 147 pages!), which is longer than my book, Eco-Literate Music Pedagogy, published in 2017 with Routledge. Ultimately, this blog can be seen as an outgrowth of that book. But ultimately, it is time I place more of my writing efforts elsewhere (such as in peer-reviewed outlets). The first post was 8/18/2018 and the final one is today, 12/07/2019.
 
When I downloaded the posts, I began putting them in various folders, by topic. Inadvertently, then, this blog provides a thematic structure for the ecological criticism I have conducted over the past two years. It can, then, also provide a direction for understanding future ecological criticism.
 
Structure of my ecological criticism of music and education

1. Philosophy
   1. Music Education Philosophy
   2. Marxian Species Being
   3. Indigenous Ecological Knowledge
   4. Gender and Ecology
   5. Religion
2. Waste
   1. Schooling
   2. Technology
3. Place
   1. Uprooted Individuals
   2. Soundscapes
4. Politics
5. Teaching Ideas
   1. Band, Orchestra, Choir
   2. General Music
   3. Music in General

 
DJS

Post 73.

My work on eco-literate pedagogy has drawn heavily on place-based, and place-conscious education. In 2003, David A. Gruenewald wrote perhaps the most cited literature review of place-based educational theory, in which he draws together the already long-standing tradition of "place-based education" with "critical pedagogy." Since Gruenewald has become a defining figure for place-based pedagogy since 2003, it seems important to revisit Gruenewald, looking at whose place-based scholarship Gruenewald was drawing on, and distinguish place-based education from more recent innovations using the name place-based and place-conscious education, which have probably drawn more on critical pedagogy than place-based education up to and including Gruenewald. In this post I'm drawing heavily on Gruenewald's 2003 article, "The Best of Both Worlds: A Critical Pedagogy of Place," which is locked behind a paywall on the Sage Journals website. All apologies for my readers that cannot access the original. Capitalism sucks.

Gruenewald claims that then place-based education "lacks a specific theoretical tradition," (despite book-length theories by Esteva & Prakash, Orr, and Theobald, each classics of place-based education, among others) and draws from three disciplines "claiming place as a guiding construct."

1. Outdoor education
   
2. Environmental and ecological education
   
3. Rural education

Perhaps it is right to suggest that, in 2003, the easiest commonality to be identified is the ecological (that is, the environmental) concerns of all place-based educational theory; as outdoor education, environmental and ecological education, and rural education each speaking quite a bit about the natural environment. Each of the references Gruenewald draws from to produce his critical pedagogy of place is already critical (they weren't lacking in criticality), especially around environmental issues, drawing on theorists like E. F. Schumacher, Wendell Berry, Aldo Leopold, and Ivan Illich to analyze and deconstruct globalism and decry environmental devastation. In fact, Gruenewald's sections reinforce the fact that place-based education IS ecological:

1. Introduction
   
2. Critical Pedagogy's Social Context
   
3. Ecological Place-Based Education
   
4. A Critical pedagogy of Place: Decolonizing and Reinhabitation
   
5. Conclusion
   

Gruenewald, in addition to discussing place as ecological throughout, includes a sub-section on "The Critical Ecological Challenge." Gruenewald writes, "The ecological challenge to critical pedagogy is to expand its socio-cultural analysis and agendas for transformation to include an examination of the interactions between cultures and ecosystems." The seminal place-based theorists that Gruenewald references, like Chet Bowers, David Orr, Gustavo Esteva, and Madhu Suri Prakash (my philosophy professor at Penn State), critiqued critical pedagogy for its individualism and its anthropocentrism. They demand the recognition of "traditional cultural knowledge ... as a form of moral authority" and suggest eco-justice be a framework for educational theory and practice. What is the aim of this pre-Gruenewald place-based education? "People must be challenged to reflect on their own concrete situationality in a way that explores the complex interrelationships between cultural and ecological environments." (Gruenewald continues this pair, cultural and ecological, throughout the paper, and even ends it as such).

The section on place in Gruenewald is titled "Ecological Place-Based Education." I guess someone who was entirely unfamiliar with any of the early place-based theorists might think that the name implies there were non-ecological place-based education going on. There were not. As Gruenewald writes, "Critical place-based pedagogy cannot be only about struggles with human oppression [this is what critical pedagogy had done to this point, which was its great failing]. It also must embrace the experience of being human in connection with the others and with the world of nature, and the responsibility to conserve and restore our shared environments for future generations."

Sadly, this is exactly what many place-based and place-conscious theorists have done since--disconnected the human from nature (an offense to many indigenous knowledge systems place-based education comes out of). That is current place-based scholars' great malpractice, to take a theory that is intrinsically ecological, and suggest it can be done without being ecological. Shame! But such a common theme for Western scholarship through the ages.

So, why do so many scholars today want to use the name place-based education to validate their environmentally silent scholarship? Don't they realize the world is being destroyed, and they might say something that can make it better? How do they get away with this obvious malpractice in a supposed peer-review? I suspect, because Gruenewald draws heavily on critical theory (the Illich/Freire disagreements of the 1980s were so heated because critical pedagogy has been slow on recognizing any ecological challenges people face), place-based education can be co-opted as another way to preach the gospel of critical pedagogy. Perhaps its a way of scholars validating their destructive suburbanite lifestyles. Or maybe its just another U.S. scholarly discipline co-opting of indigenous knowledge systems while claiming criticality. But as Madhu repeated many times throughout my course and discussion since with her--our teaching MUST challenge our lifestyles. I challenge today's place-based and place-conscious theorists and pedagogues to again challenge themselves as the roots of place-based education requires. It is challenging. It is hard. But it is needed.

DJS
(image)

Post 72.

Around our planet, coral reef ecosystems are dying. They die because of coral mining, pollution, fishing, and human-made canals. Climate change causes bleaching (image), which also leads to unhealthy reef ecosystems. Scientists say, unless we can turn the tide of climate change and ocean pollution, 100% of coral reefs will be in danger by 2050.

Last week on NPR I heard a short segment on the importance of Coral Reef soundscapes. When reefs are unhealthy, they go silent. Silence is a sign, in this case, of disease. When young fish are born in silent reefs, they leave to find a healthy ecosystem in which to live. However, fish can also help reefs heal themselves, so drawing fish back to dead sections is essential. Tim Gordon did his doctoral thesis on this: "Clownfish whoop, and cod grunt. And parrotfish crunch their way through coral as they graze. And sea urchins scrape, and shrimp snap their claws. And together, that makes a symphony of reef noise that can be heard from miles away." Gordon and colleagues at University of Exeter recorded reef soundscapes in healthy areas and played them in dying reef ecosystems. 50% of reef fish returned.

Discovery of Sound in the Sea has a description of how sound is used in researching coral reefs on their webpage, which can be useful for teachers who want to use this information. They also include a sound library that can be used to inspire student compositions. Imagine students writing their own music inspired by the sounds of undersea earthquakes, hydrothermal vents, clownfish, or manatees and helping their communities better understand the ecological challenges facing our oceans!

DJS

Post 71.

Conservative author Roger Scruton discusses the meaning of natural beauty to human observers: "From the earliest drawings … art has searched for meaning in the natural world. The experience of natural beauty is not a sense of ‘how nice!’ or ‘how pleasant!’ It contains a reassurance that this world is a right and fitting place to be—a home in which our human powers and prospects find confirmation." [1]

But are we wrecking our shared home? Nature has long inspired composers, and as a result composers’ musics have been a sort of commentary on nature. Because of the distinctive ecological challenges we face in the 21st Century, thinking about nature has become a critical issue—our relationship with the natural world matters.

I find Alan Hovhaness’s composition, And God Created Great Whales[2], a powerful statement, in the Western classical tradition. And so I use this composition to open conversations about place and ecological sustainability with my students. Hovhaness uses musical instruments to echo the melodies of whales. But Western authors have long failed to recognize animal music as music. In this tradition, music is something human persons do, not whales. But whale songs seem to be a prime example of animal music. Whales share melodies across long distances, and even have favorite songs. We don’t know entirely what whales do with these melodies, or how they experience them. Possibly for aggression or mating. Humans use music for both of these purposes. Or perhaps to experience beauty. We do know whales have an advanced limbic system, a system that is connected to emotional experiences in mammals.[3] This makes whales similar to humans in some interesting ways. Knowing this, perhaps, helps us see our pollution of the oceans a real problem. A moral problem. One we must work to solve.





Music happens in places. The musics of whales happens in the deep ocean. Some human musics occur in urban places, and others in rural places. Such a simple statement, and yet many people think about music as placeless. Something only heard digitally and created a distant somewhere else. But all musics happen somewhere. Our first experiences of music are often in our homes, with mothers and grandmas, fathers and grandpas, uncles and aunts, singing and dancing for the joy of being.

But today everything is not in order in our home. In Greta Thunberg's words, "our house is on fire,"[4] and this seems to be true. Everybody has a duty to act, in small and large ways, to help repair our planet. Our home. To understand others. To understand the non-human world. To work for protection of wilderness and for clean soil, water, and air. To create new parks. And to work for reducing waste, including CO2.

DJS

References:
[1] Scruton, Roger. Beauty: A very short introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 65.
[2] Link: https://youtu.be/1pTu4pkmtpU
[3] http://www.ecofuturedevelopment.com/orca-whale-emotional-center/
[4] Thunberg, Greta. No one is too small to make a difference (Dante, MT: Penguin Books, 2019).
Image: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/ba/Southern_right_whale_breaching%2C_South_Africa.jpg

Post 70.

This semester I am teaching The Evolution of Jazz, and we're using Gioia's The History of Jazz as a text book. This is the first time I have finished reading this book (I used a different text last time I taught, but wasn't happy with that book), and on page 370 he brings in a word I hadn't previously come across (or if I did, I didn't recognize it): disintermediation. He defines disintermediation as "the removal of key participants in an economic process because they no longer add sufficient value to justify their roles." He talks about how, because of technology, disintermediation has transformed the way jazz is performed and listened to. As I read this section, I think disintermediation, however awkward a word, is embedded in capitalism itself, and is a major reason for the ecological crises.

In the 19th Century, the rural English Luddites roamed the countryside breaking into cotton and woolen mills destroying new equipment. Ultimately their movement was unsuccessful. People had a natural distaste for this. But, imagine what it must have been like for generations of tailors and other craftspeople who had lived a certain way of life, and all of a sudden factories made the production of clothing so cheap that nobody was able to make money doing it anymore. These were among the earliest victims of capitalism (though of course, the mills they were fighting against were the end result of a system that also kidnapped people from Africa and put their families in slavery for profit). Today, still, many people have found their jobs ended by technological advancement. Disintermediation is the norm. If it takes 20 people to do something today, tomorrow a capitalist will figure out how to do it with 10, and 10 people will have to find other work. Even though we produce too much. Even though plastics are killing the oceans and ourselves. (image).

Is there a way for us in education to teach against this deadly ethic of disintermediation? Can we teach for a new, slower production? One with less waste? One that doesn't waste people? Or plastics? I recently wrote an article in TOPICS, "Waste in Popular Music Education," in which I challenge the waste metaphor in rock music, as well as the waste we create in music education. "What a horrible thing it is for music educators to teach children that they need to produce more waste!" It's time we teach for the wasteless good life--a eudemonia relevant in the 21st Century.

DJS

Post 69.

In 2011, in a response to the emerging strain of pragmatism in environmental philosophy, deep ecologist George Sessions challenged the direction environmental philosophy was going. "American pragmatism was critiqued in 1911 by Harvard philosopher George Santayana, and later by Bertrand Russell, for its anthropocentrism and uncritical support for the American industrial unlimited-growth society ... are they actually diverting attention from the more global and radical social change that needs to occur?" In the Deep Ecology tradition, there is a distinction made between shallow ecology, which only considers the needs of humans narrowly, and deep ecology, which considers the needs of all species and ecosystems. Historically, the focus of deep ecology (and ecofeminism, social ecology, and, more recently, ecosocialism) has been on suggesting "limits to growth." In contrast, the 1980s saw the rise of the mantra "sustainable development," which is shallow ecology at its most ineffective. The change to sustainable development represents a failure to challenge the root cause of the problem, an economic and social model based on eternal growth. Sustainable development empowers the system's worst culprits, disempowering people with false hope in magical technological economic solutions produced by experts living somewhere else.

Now in 2019, the deep ecology movement seems to have slowed. Even sustainable development advocates like Al Gore seem impotent in the face of the new global fascism. Onto the stage walks a powerful young woman, Greta Thunberg. Her sincerity is beautiful. And her anger is beautiful. I picked up a copy of Greta Thunberg's book No One is Too Small To Make a Difference (image) while Christmas shopping in Barnes & Nobles this week. Here are some quotes from her speech "Unpopular" (pp. 12-14).

• "You only speak of green, eternal economic growth because you are too scared of being unpopular."
  
• "You are not mature enough to tell it like it is."
  
• "We are about to sacrifice our civilization for the opportunity of a very small number of people to continue to make enormous amounts of money."
  
• "But it is the sufferings of the many which pay for the luxuries of the few."
  
• "You say that you love your children above everything else. And yet you are stealing their future."
  
• "We cannot solve a crisis without treating it as a crisis. We need to keep the fossil fuels in the ground and we need to focus on equity."
  
• "And if solutions within this system are so impossible to find then maybe we should change the system itself?"
  
• "We've come here to let you know that change is coming whether you like it or not. The real power belongs to the people."
  

Here is a young person who understands, it seems intuitively, that the global politics around ecological issues today is vapid. She recognizes the economic roots of the climate crisis. She recognizes the suffering embedded in capitalism. She recognizes the selfishness of capitalists. She understands the intersectionality of ecology and social class. And she challenges us that if our system cannot face our greatest crisis, we need to look for alternatives. While Thunberg's ecology may not be fully "deep" in the environmental activist tradition. It's certainly not as mature of Rachel Carson's deep ecology, or as John Muir's. But her ecology is certainly not "shallow" ecology either! This young woman recognizes fully the challenge, and rather than employ the popular and impotent sustainable development rhetoric that is the dominant model today, Thunberg reminds us of the roots of this fight we find ourselves in. That the ecological tradition (the early Sierra Club, Greenpeace, the Deep Ecology movement, Ecofeminism) has been to demand limits to growth. To admit that growth is built into our economic and social systems. And that growth itself cannot go on indefinitely. We live on a finite planet, let's act like adults, or at least like smart kids!

DJS

Post 68.

In the book "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed," Jared Diamond identifies twelve environmental problems that face humankind today. The first 8 have caused civilizations to collapse in the past.

1. "Deforestation and habitat destruction
2. Soil problems (erosion, salinization, and soil fertility losses)
3. Water management problems
4. Overhunting
5. Overfishing
6. Effects of introduced species on native species
7. Overpopulation
8. Increased per-capita impact of people"

Diamond identifies four additional problems that face society today:

1. "Anthropogenic climate change
2. Buildup of toxins in the environment
3. Energy shortages
4. Full human use of the Earth’s photosynthetic capacity"

In my book I suggest that becoming eco-literate requires we understand the ecological crises as plural. Though I did not use Diamond's book to theorize the structure of this plurality, David Orr, in his 1992 book, suggested three crises, which has also been suggested by Vandana Shiva. My point in Eco-Literate Music Pedagogy was, rather than suggesting there are exactly two, or three, or twelve crises, eco-literate citizenry cannot focus only on a single crisis, such as climate change, and ignore or even exacerbate another crises. As I didn't deal specifically with Diamond's twelve challenges in the book, lets look at three of them here from a creative teacher's lens.

1. Deforestation: Facing deforestation, students can be shown artwork and musics that celebrate forests. Since we will need to create more wildlife sanctuaries, students can artistically celebrate their local parks and even work toward their expansion, or work to improve habitats within those parks.
2. Soil: Many schools now have school gardens. It is important that students be connected to actual soil, learning about their bioregion's planting and seasonal cycles. (I even called my philosophy a "Philosophy on Soil" in the book). There are many ways to celebrate soil through music, including songs and visual artwork (use these interdisciplinarily). Get your students outside and talking about, singing, dancing, and celebrating the soil, because the next generation will help us overcome soil-loss problems previous generations have exacerbated.
3. Water: Water is life. American Indian groups led the protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline beginning in 2016, suggesting this pipeline represented a threat to the region's drinking water. Beginning in 2014, Flint, Michigan has experienced lead in their drinking water. Honduras and other Central American nations have experienced a clean water crisis, which has led to increased immigration and climate refugees here in the U.S. When we teach our students about the needs of "the other" we need to include the ecological realities people face today.

Whether you teach music, art, and dance, or use the arts to teach in your classroom, young students can feel empowered when you provide opportunities for songwriting, painting, dancing, and other creative responses to the ecological crises. It is important that children learn the challenges, and realize ways to respond, resist, and change our communities and societies moving forward. (image link)

I'll end with a quote from Michael Silver's book, Voices of Drought: The Politics of Music and Environment in Northeastern Brazil: "Climate change and other forms of environmental decline will affect a greater range of human activities than we typically acknowledge. As natural resources become unavailable, new, sustainable materials will need to be used to produce (and reproduce) music. ... With changing weather patterns come challenges (or renewed activities of) forms of local ecological knowledge. If populations of birds, whose calls convey vital knowledge to farmers, migrate to more hospitable places or become extinct, local ways of knowing become obsolete."

It is my sincere hope that, in response to these great challenges we face, a creative pedagogical approach might help unearth solutions. Local knowledges are constantly evolving, and we must all play our part in living a philosophy on soil.

DJS

Post 67.

Representative Ocasio-Cortez introduced her version of the New Green Deal to the House in February 2019. What I find most compelling about this legislation is the way in which it understands the climate crisis as intersectional. Here are three important sections (quoted) from the Bill.

1. "Climate change constitutes a direct threat to the national security of the United States ... by impacting the economic, environmental, and social stability of countries and communities around the world; and by acting as a threat multiplier."
   
2. It is the duty of the Federal Government to secure for the people of the United States:
   
   1. "Clean air and water"
      
   2. "Climate and community resiliency"
      
   3. "Healthy food"
      
   4. "Access to nature"
      
   5. "A sustainable environment"
      
3. "Frontline and vulnerable communities ... to promote justice and equity by stopping current, preventing future, and repairing historic oppression of"
   
   1. "indigenous peoples"
      
   2. "communities of color"
      
   3. "migrant communities"
      
   4. "deindustrialized communities"
      
   5. "depopulated rural communities"
      
   6. "the poor"
      
   7. "low-income workers"
      
   8. "women"
      
   9. "the elderly"
      
   10. "the unhoused"
       
   11. "people with disabilities"
       
   12. "youth"
       

What do these three points say to me, as a music teacher?

1. Climate change is the cause and a multiplying factor in exacerbating the current ecological crises. In this document, Ocasio-Cortez and other House members link economic, environmental and social stability. There are people out there who want to separate the economic and environmental challenges from the very idea of social stability. Some even claim uprootedness is good. But, even if physical movement ought to be free, it is better for all if there are stable communities between which one might move. I have argued that it by being rooted in locations that we are able to respond to the ecological challenges. Social rootedness seems to be identified as a "good" in the New Green Deal, which is consistent with ecological scholarship. Because the climate crises are uprooting (extended droughts in Syria and Central America have caused and exacerbated the current refugee crises in the U.S. and Europe). As music teachers, we can begin by performing and creating music that celebrates the beauty of nature, the histories of the places where we reside, and the epistemologies of the communities our students are in. We can experience the other from a stable self, just like we can aid refugees when we reside in place ourselves.
   
2. Ocasio-Cortez's New Green Deal identifies certain duties of government. Of interest to me as a music teacher is climate and community resiliency and access to nature. In my grandfather's generation there was a great public movement to create new parks. Biologist E.O. Wilson calls for half of the earth being converted into some sort of wilderness preserve to stem the species-loss crisis. Protected spaces can be a point of pride for rural, urban, and suburban communities. Local, state and federal efforts can be made to create new parks that serve as points of pride and homes for wildlife. Perhaps as music teachers we can sing and have our students write songs that recaptures this ethic of conservation and park creation.
   
3. This list of frontline and vulnerable communities provides an extensive list of intersectional identities. Music teachers can help by creating solidarity; recognizing how our students are vulnerable (even oppressed in Freirean terminology). For instance, where do we open space in our pedagogy for indigenous, rural, elderly, and the unhoused voices? Musics? Our teaching practices can be made robust by expanding the voices we bring into our classrooms.
   

On a final note, John Bellamy Foster connects the history of Ocasio'Cortez's effort with the efforts of Bernie Sanders, and Jill Stein before her. He challenges the New Green Deal approaches: "None consider the full level of waste built into the current accumulation system and how that could be turned to ecological advantage. Instead, all of the plans are based on the notion of promoting rapid, exponential economic growth or capital accumulation—despite the fact that this would compound the planetary emergency, and in spite of the fact that the real successes of the Second New Deal had much less to do with growth than economic and social redistribution."

So, I end this post with a comment and question. The New Green Deal seems like a strong piece of legislation that will move us in the right direction. It will not put the ecological challenges entirely behind us, but it will get us moving in the right direction -- toward a sustainable and regenerative culture. But, can legislation do what Foster wants, and address the waste that is intrinsic to capitalism?

DJS

Post 66.

Back in 2016, Daily Mail published a map of the U.S., with rivers showing how water connects us all. When I saw this, I saw a body with veins. Mother Earth on whom we live. This particular map was created by Fejetlenfej, a geographer using open-source QGIS software. We are interconnected. A poor person in rural Kansas and another in urban New Orleans share a vein--share life--in a very real, material, tangible way. The spiritual and material are one. And though this map seems to respect national borders, our shared circulatory system doesn't. Texas and Mexico share water. New York and Ontario. Without clean water we die. Water is life, and sustainable water practices are essential.

Nearly billion people lack access to clean water, and 2.5 billion lack adequate sanitation, according to CDC. For many, this means increased disease and death. But what can we do as teachers? Many songs discuss water, and can open space for important conversations about issues around water pollution, clean water access, sanitation, and our interconnectedness. Artists & Climate Change website includes an article on the Algonquin Water Song. Here's an extended quote from the article:  "Our water is under siege from pollution, climate change, mismanagement and corporate environmental disaster. Without clean water, we cannot live. In Native American, and many other Indigenous cultures, women are the Keepers of the Water, and men are the Keepers of Fire. In recent months, many brave women who are Water Protectors have captured the attention of the world whether at Standing Rock, attempting to stop the pipelines, or Flint, Michigan, demanding clean water for their children, or ever-increasing battlegrounds of environmental disaster. The Elders have understood since the beginning of time that clean water is essential for the survival of all living beings, and they continue to fight for Mother Earth’s most precious resource. Now, they are asking women to join them for one minute a day to sing to the water. It is incumbent for all of us, especially the women, to help them raise awareness and protect the water for future generations."

What songs might your students know about water? What cultural traditions might they bring to school? What water traditions do their families practice? How can we help students love the water, and truly understand how precious it is? What are some popular songs, band, choir, or orchestra pieces that open conversation around these important water issues? Comment below.

DJS

Post 65.

In the far north, as ice forms and cracks it produces musical sounds. In a video on Singing Ice, Jonna Jinton--who moved to rural northern Sweden eight years ago, and now documents her experiences on YouTube-- talks about the sounds made by ice. "It feels a bit spooky to walk down to the ice at night ... being surrounded by these loud, strange sounds. It's like the sound of an ancient spirit awakening under the ice, roaring out in the night."

What might music education be if we included the singing ice in our classrooms? How do our experiences with ice--our global understandings and local experiences--change in the face of melting glaciers, or the pollution caused we cause in our home freezers? In an article in South Atlantic Quarterly, Matthew Burtner suggests music is well-suited for understanding and depicting climate change. Following this model, we could guide students to compose their own musical stories of ice - program music that relates individual experiences with ice, which are dependent upon local weather and climate, as well as global challenges. Informances (informative-music-performances) are great ways to not only help students learn music and social challenges embedded in musics, but also to teach communities through musical action.

There is also written music that might be used to open conversations about ice and ecological issues. I can't help but think of Jinton's Singing Ice when I hear Bruce Sled's wordless SSA composition, Ice. Similarly the piece for young string orchestra, Ice Mountain by Stephen Chin, can open space for conversations about ice. Depending on where you live, perhaps the best thing is to take a field trip to a frozen pond or lake, where students can record their local soundscapes in the winter ice. Returning home, the students can arrange these recordings into a cohesive composition to share in concert. Their compositions may not be as beautiful as Jinton's, or Sled's, or Chin's portrayals, but education is about process over product; and music education is primarily about education.

DJS